On December 7, 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Two months later on February 19, 1942 President Roosevelt signed the Executive Order 9066, this order stated that the Military had the authority to place people in an area of the Military's choice and decide who came and went and who was to stay and for how long. Not long after that Japanese Americans were evacuated from California and were forced to sell their land and their businesses. The Department of Treasury froze all of their bank accounts and only allowed them to take out $100 a month if they had no other way of earning money. The military had no regard for the actual citizenship of these people, all they saw was that they were of Japanese decent and that they saw them as a supposed threat. Over 100,000 men, women, and children were held for "investigation of their loyalty". Of the 100,00 held, 70,000 were American citizen. These Japanese Americans were held against their will and in prison-like camps. There were no actual charges against them and they were never brought to trial before being ordered to serve an undisclosed sentence in these camps.
Not all of the Japanese Americans whom were forced to leave their homes and lives behind did so without a fight. There were four cases brought before the Supreme Court and the court had a majority decision in upholding the Executive Decision. The court stated, "
because persons of Japanese ancestry have been faced with many restrictions while residing in the United States, they may have become more isolated from the rest of the population and more attached to Japan and Japanese institutions".
This is what the Supreme Court of the United States of America had to say in regards to the civil rights of American citizens. These facts are out right appalling and embarrassing as an American and horrifying as the girlfriend of someone who's grandmother was placed in one of these camps and forced to sell her land. She was born and raised in America and had her rights taken away from purely because of her racial background and how people of the extremist and perpetual terrified government saw her.
I am what someone would call a history nut, so anything that deals with the past I am immediately drawn to it like a mosquito drawn to a light. In your blog about how the Japanese-Americans were unlawfully head against their will in WW2 was unconstitutional because it was against their given rights. No I believe that these camps were necessary in the ways because there were numerous amounts of Japanese-Americans leaking information back to their homeland. Because of this the government had to do something to protect our secrecy of war information and to protect the citizens of this country from experiencing another Pearl Harbor type attack. With these camps the government was able to extract so much information that helped us in the war. If we did not do this WW2 might have turned out differently. The way that the government acted on this may have been extreme in some ways, like making them sell their land, and to freeze their bank accounts, but the process of keeping an eye on them was needed to detect which ones were spies leaking information the Japanese Empire.
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